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Whole Foods

Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ: WFM) is a foods supermarket chain based in Austin, Texas which emphasizes "natural and organic products." The company has been ranked among the most socially responsible businesses and placed third on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's list of Top 25 Green Power Partners.

In 1978, 25-year-old college dropout John Mackey and his 21-year-old girlfriend Rene Lawson, borrowed $45,000 from family and friends to open a small natural foods store called SaferWay in Austin, Texas (the name being a spoof of Safeway). When the couple were evicted from their apartment for storing food products in it, they decided to live at the store. Because it was zoned for commercial use, there was no shower stall, so they bathed using a water hose attached to their dishwasher.

Two years later, John Mackey partnered with Craig Weller and Mark Skiles to merge SaferWay with their Clarksville Natural Grocery, resulting in the opening of the original Whole Foods Market on...

Square has inked a deal to process payments at select Whole Foods locations, the two companies announced early Tuesday. The deal marks Square's first partnership with a major grocery store chain. Whole Foods is arguably Square's most prominent retail...

Whole Foods Market is giving its annual Do Something Reel Film Festival the digital treatment and taking it online. Now in its third year, the festival showcases films and documentaries about food and environmental issues. Starting on April 22 (Earth...

Microsoft has demonstrated an early prototype of a Kinect-powered shopping cart, which is being developed for Whole Foods by Texas-based company Chaotic Moon. The project is called the “Smarter Cart” and it uses a tablet and scanners to read the item...

Pinterest is on everyone's lips these days, and many brands are trying to figure out how to leverage the platform as a marketing tool. Fortunately, there are already a handful of brands out there that are doing it well. Pinterest co-founder and desig...

The Perfect Palette, a wedding blog that explores "the color palette possibilities for your wedding" and serves as a resource for other wedding ideas, would seem to be a perfect match for Pinterest, and it is. The site is far and away the biggest bra...

On Pinterest? Follow Mashable to check out our favorite infographics, tech news, internet memes and digital culture! There's a hot new social networking property and, as usual, some brands have already colonized it. As we embrace the new year, Pinter...

LivingSocial launched a 50% off deal at Whole Foods Markets Tuesday, in its highest profile deal since it offered the same discount at Amazon in January. Visitors to LivingSocial's site or recipients of the company's emails are eligible for the offer...

Megan Berry is marketing manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter at @meganberry. Twitter can sometimes create a dilemma for brands. It’s a medium ...

As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we're taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is "Must-Follow Brand." Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! Sponsorships are available. Please contact...

Businesses use social media -- that's no longer news. But not all of them really understand its unique properties and the opportunities it can create. Copy-and-pasting traditional advertising onto social platforms doesn't work. It requires openness, ...

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. In a world where small businesses with corporate blogs receive 55 percent ...

Whole Foods, a popular health and organic grocery chain, is the subject of a new Facebook scam that phishes for users' credit and other personal information. A deluge of fraudulent Facebook Pages are popping up that promise a limited number of users ...

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter. As a company, Whole Foods has impressively embraced socia...

As the Whole Foods Boycott on Facebook continues to swell — the group now has over 27,000 members — we're finding out that CEO John Mackey's statements in The Wall Street Journal are affecting more than just angry Facebookers, but consumers in genera...

Whole Foods has a very active social media presence. They boast over 1.2 million followers on Twitter and more than 100,000 fans on Facebook. It's a true big brand social media success story; or is it? Comments made by the company's chief executive, ...

A CEO and a package of blogging software can result in a tricky mix. Unless the CEO’s primary occupation is blogging. Either the executive is labeled with the stop-blogging-start-working tag, or the CEO stretches the bounds of corporate propriety and...

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